The paper presents a short overview of the development of two linguistic subfields, semantics and pragmatics, in Estonia, from the general theoretical perspective as well as concerning the empirical studies of the Estonian language. The history of these studies goes back to the GGG, first, in the sense that their origins as contemporary linguistic disciplines are in the GGG, and second, their further developments after the GGG have proceeded more or less along the same path as the conceptions of semantics-pragmatics which grew out from Generative Grammar via generative semantics and its successors elsewhere. And as the third topic, the development of theoretical linguistics to a subfield of its own in Estonia, as supported by the described developments in semantics and pragmatics, is commented.
In semantic research three developmental stages, although partially overlapping, are differentiated, starting from the publication of Chomsky’s “Aspects” in 1965 and resulting in semantics as a full-fledged component/level of language description: 1) treatment of semantic features as predicates which can take certain types of arguments; 2) presentation of semantic structures of words and sentences as hierarchical predicate-argument structures which allow logical processing (e.g. deriving inferences); 3) based on this, the possibility of representing the meanings of coherent texts (e.g. descriptions of events) as complex semantic structures.
Through this development, pragmatics as a separate research field was also included in linguistics. Its primary interests lie not in linguistic structures (words, phrases, sentences, or dialogs as texts), but in units and structures of communication (communicative acts, participants, their beliefs and communicative goals, dynamics of the communication process, etc.). In doing this, it uses as input the data provided by semantics.
Concerning theoretical linguistics, the paper gives a short overview of the process of its transition from the generative paradigm to the cognitive-functional one. At the Department of General Linguistics established at Tartu University in the early 1990s, the cognitive linguistic approach also became the primary one. Several studies, theoretical as well as those dealing with concrete empirical subareas of Estonian lexica and syntax, have been carried out by linguistics students, and thus a new generation of researchers has emerged. In 2007 the Estonian Cognitive Linguistics Association (ECLA) was established, which has good contacts with the International Cognitive Linguistics Association (ICLA).
At the end of the overview, the role of the GGG in the development of computational linguistics and language technology in Estonia is also touched upon briefly.
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